Rube Goldberg machine created by our summer campers!

Rube Goldberg machine created by our summer campers!

Our summer camps (you can still sign up!) feature lots of classes we don’t offer during the year, including Crazy Contraptions! One of the contraptions our campers make is a Rube Goldberg machine. This one is quite involved! As you can see from the instructor’s description below, the campers who created this machine used marbles, golf balls, balloons … AND managed at one point to get a marble to drop to start a Lego Robotics program involving a motion sensor!

How it works:

The golf-ball rolls away from the computer, pulling out a piece of paper that was holding up a marble from rolling down the tube to the computer. The marble then hits the ‘Y’ key on the computer starting a WeDo program that waits for the motion sensor. The golf-ball runs down the track and gets in the way of the motion sensor (it was actually supposed to hit the balloon and make it wiggle but oh well). The motor then spins and drops another marble onto a track, which falls down and hits a see-saw that launches a domino into others, and they go down a track and up some blocks to finally push off the last domino which is attached to a tennis ball.

The falling domino pulls the tennis ball off the table where it is precariously balanced and pulls the bell up. The bell hits the domino case and it rings when it gets to the top! Awesome!